Tag: Tacloban

If you are given a second life, what will you do? That is the question that always pops up in my mind after my experience with Super Typhoon Yolanda. It was the 8th of November in 2013 when super typhoon Yolanda or Haiyan brought tremendous destruction in the Philippines. Leyte, particularly Tacloban was one of the many…

With updates from Bam Alegre Finally after weeks of discussion in Paris and decades of international disagreements, representatives from 195 nations have created the Paris Agreement at the United Nations climate change talks in France. This agreement is historic because it is universal — all developed and developing countries will follow its rules and regulations….

This is a story of two very different people, bound by an issue that will bring together 147 world leaders in Paris, France — climate change. Paris, France Former Philippine Climate Change Commissioner Yeb Saño is in Paris now, having spent the last six months on a pilgrimage that started out in Tacloban and across…

Two years ago, super typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) made its third of six landfalls over the town of Daanbantayan in northern Cebu. That time, Felisa Amistoso and her family were still living in Sitio Samar in Barangay Agujo among fish pens and a creek, in a small, dilapidated shanty on a plot of land that was…

It was the hottest time of day inside a rickety bus last April that I think I fell in love with Visayas. My skin was dark and burnt, having spent the last four days on polar ends of Cebu, and my forehead was dripping wet with sweat as we made our way from the Remegio…

Nestor pointed at a 15-foot coconut tree standing by the sea shore. Its leaves have fallen off and the trunk shows chipping and cuts from children trying to reach for a fruit. “Mas mataas pa dyan ‘yung alon” (The waves are higher than that tree), he recalled. The tree reminded him of November 8, 2013…

It may seem like a movie. But there was no exaggeration to it. It was real. And I was there. Super Typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan) became one of the strongest recorded tropical cyclones in global history. On November 8, 2013, thousands of people died in Tacloban, Leyte, my mother’s hometown. It wasn’t just the strong wind…

There is nothing in the world more fluid than the news. Today’s PDAF scam headline could be cradling my dog’s poo at the bottom of his cage tomorrow. I’m not the first reporter who is thankful that stories expire at a (nearly) daily rate. We rarely take our stories home – especially when the day’s coverage…